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Car Bomb Suspect Worked at Aviation Company

BANGALORE, India, July 9 — Kafeel Ahmed, the engineer identified by the police as one of two main suspects in the British car bomb plot, worked for much of last year as an aeronautical engineer for an Indian outsourcing company that designs aircraft parts for companies like Boeing and Airbus.

Mr. Ahmed worked in the Bangalore office of the company, Infotech Enterprises, between December 2005 and July 2006, K. S. Susindar, a company spokesman, said in a telephone interview on Monday. Mr. Susindar offered that information after checking an employee database that listed Mr. Ahmed as having degrees from universities in India and Northern Ireland; he had a master’s in aeronautical engineering. The company did not say exactly which aviation projects Mr. Ahmed, one of 5,500 employees, worked on.

Mr. Ahmed is one of the two men described by the police as principal suspects in the failed attacks in Britain. The police have said he was the driver of the Jeep Cherokee that, loaded with gasoline canisters, was driven into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport on June 30.

Burns cover 90 percent of his body, the police say, and he remains in critical condition. He has not been charged, and his condition has prevented the police from questioning him.

In an interview on Sunday, Gopal Hosur, a deputy police chief of Bangalore, where Mr. Ahmed grew up, said his friends had told the police that Mr. Ahmed returned to India from Britain as something of a radical in 2005, the year he began work at Infotech. He had been known to be pious and goodhearted, but he surprised friends when he returned home with a traditional Muslim beard in place of his goatee, brimming with notions about fighting for Islam, Mr. Hosur said.

There has been no suggestion that Mr. Ahmed did anything untoward while at Infotech. Mr. Susindar said that Mr. Ahmed resigned from the company voluntarily and that the company had no problem with him.

Infotech’s clients have included some of the biggest names in aviation, according to its filings to investors: the Boeing Company and Airbus SAS, each of which has set up dedicated engineering teams at Infotech; Bombardier, the Canadian maker of corporate jets; and Pratt & Whitney, the aircraft engine maker. A spokeswoman for Boeing, Lizum Mishra, said the company would not be able to comment on the subject on short notice. An Airbus spokeswoman, Barbara Kracht, when told of Mr. Ahmed’s work at Infotech, said, “I’m absolutely not aware of this.”

Another client of Infotech is the Home Office of the British government, which is responsible for domestic security and is leading the investigation into the car bomb plot. Infotech helped the Home Office build a searchable computer database of criminal activity in Cornwall and Devon Counties.

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Infotech also offers outsourced engineering in other industries, including for Alstom, the French maker of rail equipment and power systems.

Mr. Susindar said that Mr. Ahmed, an aviation specialist, was unlikely to have worked on projects outside his domain.

“He was sincere at work,” Mr. Susindar said in the interview after speaking to an Infotech employee who knew Mr. Ahmed. “And he was very much to himself. There were no friends or anything.”

Infotech Enterprises, based in Hyderabad, India, recorded $120 million in sales last year. It belongs to a wave of Indian outsourcing firms that are taking on high-end projects from Western companies.

“If the planes are designed in the West, the Indian designers are helping to make the planes a reality,” said Samad Masood, a technology analyst at Ovum, a research and advisory firm in London. The Indian engineers, he added, are “designing or helping to design pretty serious components that go into airplanes.”

Further evidence emerged Monday connecting Mr. Ahmed to a passenger in the Jeep, Dr. Bilal Abdulla, a British-born Iraqi doctor who is the only person to have been charged in the failed bomb attacks. Associates of the two men have told journalists that they got to know each other in Cambridge, England.

On Monday, an Indian official showed a reporter a printout of a document that he said came from a high-capacity computer hard drive seized from Mr. Ahmed’s family home in Bangalore, where the police say he lived for six months before the failed attacks. The document was a certificate from Mr. Abdulla’s medical school in Baghdad, listing his grades in a variety of subjects. On the top right of the document, a color photograph of Mr. Abdulla was attached. It was not clear when the document arrived in Mr. Ahmed’s computer.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A3 of the New York edition with the headline: Car Bomb Suspect Worked at Company With Boeing Link. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe